Is it time to recycle this drive? 1000+ bad sectors

[llinfeng]

Please advise if the attached Surface Test result is a death sentence to the hard drive. It has now accumulated 1183 bad sectors as of this typing.

I was running the "Reinitialize disk surface" job and wonder if I should simply stop the running process and recycle the faulty drive.

I tried to look through the FAQ on [bad sectors](https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_ca ... ectors.php), but none of the graphs should be as bad as mine. The drive is an external 5 TB Seagate Desktop Expansion Drive bought back in 2014, with some 39 TB written to it.

I suppose this is a good time to retire it anyways

[hdsentinel]

I'm afraid yes, with over 1000+ bad sectors, there is good chance that the hard disk may stop working at any time.

The problem is not (only) that it had many bad sectors, but the fact that there can be many MORE.

As you can see during the surface test, probably when a bad area found, the drive attempted to do further reallocation (to replace the sectors by spare sectors) but this could not be completed.
Maybe the spare area is already full and/or the disk drive "stuck" completely and the system removed it, just like if you'd disconnect.
This caused that no further sectors can be read/written (and tested) and this is why all further blocks are red and the Disk Contents Inspector also can't show the sector contents.

In some cases, re-connecting the disk drive after a complete power cycle can bring back (at least for a short time) so you can re-start the test, but considering the high number of problems (and likely a very low health) yes, it may better to recycle it.

Anyway, if you can reconnect and use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, it is possible to check its complete status, it may give some ideas, thoughts if there is anything else to try...

[llinfeng]

Thanks a lot for explaining how a bad drive can even halt the surface test After a power-cycle, I re-run the test and this time all the bad sectors showed up in the second half of the test.

In Disk Manager, upon the start of the surface test, I found the 5TB drive was partitioned into two pieces: one is 2048GB and the other is 2609.53GB. I suppose this partitioning is as expected?

Anyways, I am glad to learn a lot more about testing old HDD drives.

Thanks again.

[hdsentinel]

The partitioning sounds interesting. It may be not required at all, but it is possible to improve compatibility with older systems which can't address disk drives over 2 TB.
But then interesting that you see the 2nd partition is also over 2 TB....

[llinfeng]

I don't know much about why the partitioning was needed. It was consistent, though, across two of my attempts to run the Surface Test with option "Reinitialize disk surface".

The disk is still offered on Amazon, as "STBV5000100". The model number is SRD00F2 on my unit.

[llinfeng]

RE: partitioning during a Surface Test

I have yet another screenshot to share. This is taken when I tested another old Seagate 4 TB drive. The disk was partitioned again, with the first sector being 2048 GB. Despite being rather old, this one seems to be doing pretty well.

[llinfeng]

@hdsentinel, I wonder if a bad SATA-to-USB converter may introduce the [half-and-half result](https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/downlo ... hp?id=1967)?

ST5000DM000-1FK178 is the disk that I tested in the beginning of this thread, through its original Seagate enclosure. Right before I send it to Best Buy for recycling, I unboxed the HDD drive from its enclosure and gave it another test. Likely, I will see a 0 bad sector report. Attached is an ongoing test that has passed 50% mark. Would you say that the bare HDD drive is still good for cold storage?

Thanks a lot!

[hdsentinel]

Yes of course, I'm afraid this is possible - and not rare. This is more common with drives over 2 TB as some USB adapters do not support them properly.

Several SATA-USB converters have limitations: especially older (but some newer too) USB docking stations, converters do not properly support high-capacity drives and/or 4K drives properly.

As a result, yes, sometimes only the very first part of the drive can be diagnosed - but in some cases even no sector can be read/written at all.

[llinfeng]

Glad that the drive itself is still in good shape and all I need to do is to unbox it after so many years

Here is what I kept as a record for the "faulty" drive after the Surface test. The read and write also looks normal.

[Dridd]

The partitioning sounds interesting. It may be not required at all, but it is possible to improve compatibility with older systems which can't address disk drives over 2 TB.
But then interesting that you see the 2nd partition is also over 2 TB....

Just used HD Sentinel to test OUT (decide to trash) some large HDs.
Since I had Windows Disk Mgmt running on the side, as I had completed deleted the volume before running the surface test in HDS, I noticed the goofy partitioning show up on each drive for a while.
Every time, the initial full unused partition after start of the write test "magically" changed to two partitions. First one always 2TB, the second covering the rest of the disk.
Further on in the test, if I remember correctly, the goofy partitioning disappeared again and it returned to be a single empty partition in Diskmgmt.

BUT, I don't think the drive is actually getting partitioned. It is not a 2TB limitation thing.
I think it is merely Windows (mis-)interpretation of the data over-writing partition defining sectors. Diskmgmt will on occasion refresh it's disk info (at least on a signaled change), and then reads off bad data as GPT or MBR info.